Comment by chubot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chubot | Hacker News Reader

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OK thanks, that's helpful! It looks like a lot of the newer terminal rendering library use "diff" style of rendering like web frameworks, rather than something more stateful like curses?

Is that why you thought it would be easier? You just update the entire page on every action, and it takes care of the details of coming up with the minimal terminal codes?

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This is only tangentially related, but for those interested in programming in obscure languages, I recently discovered ble.sh which is a 30K+ line TUI for bash written in pure bash! It does basically what the fish shell does, so it has a terminal rendering library, utf-8 decoder, terminal decoder, bash parser with an AST, etc. all in bash.

https://github.com/akinomyoga/ble.sh

Some details from the author on this wiki page:

https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/How-Interactive-Shells-...

Other big shell programs:

https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/The-Biggest-Shell-Progr...

Latest Oil release makes progress on running these:

http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2020/04/release-0.8.pre4.html

Yes, my priority was making the UI done as fast as possible, as I wanted to focus on making the debugger and didn't want to think too much about UI. I looked at some examples of both of them and decided that tui-rs looks easier to use, it takes care of everything for me. Note that I might be wrong, I didn't spend even half an hour looking at the frameworks.

Another reason, albeit really small, was that tui-rs was written specifically for rust, and curses framework I looked into were essentially just C bindings, making it a bit weird to use. To be fair, this disadvantage is by far outweighed by the fact that curses is far more popular than tui-rs, and there is so much more tutorials and documentation to be found about it.

But I wanted to focus on writing the debugger, so I went with what seemed to be more convenient option and paid the price of lower control and performance - for example I have troubles implementing syntax highlighting because tui-rs tries to be clever with mine ansi escape codes.

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Thanks for the links, especially the ble.sh looks amazing.

Yes that makes sense... I think I used curses once like 10+ years ago, and other than that haven't done any TUI programming.

So I'm interested in what people are using now, and it seems like there are some nice new libraries.

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